fire always burns itself out
by sapphireswimming
Summary: "Wait for me in space, Saji," she says. "I'll be there soon."


**When Saji first got the emoticon-less message from Louise at the train station in episode 20, it was going too fast for me to catch the text and, for a minute, I completely misunderstood its meaning. Which means that this is, thankfully, a wildly AU idea, but one that wasn't going to leave my head until I wrote it. So, warning for suicide. It's not detailed, but it's a pretty integral part of the story.  
**

 **This fic is told in alternating scenes from slightly different times—it does not flow chronologically.**

 **There are major spoilers for Saji and Louise's story lines through the beginning of season 2.**

 **For Gundam 00 Week's Day 1- Alone**

* * *

 **fire always burns itself out**

April 2, 2017

* * *

It is too much, she decides, as she turns to stare out at the hazy whiteness of the window. She looks at it for several long minutes, though she can't see anything beyond the fluttering curtain. The world is still out there, she knows, through the glare of the blinding light.

The world must not have ended, if she is still here in this bed with its stiff white sheets. They are starchy and noisy, and her mother would have thrown a fit and had them all replaced with something more luxurious if she had been here.

But her mother is not here, and she is alone.

She is alone but the earth is still turning, trapping her in this timeless space, where the curtain waves in the breeze of the open window for hours, and nothing else moves.

She is, in turns, grateful and overwhelmed by the endless time in which she finds herself enveloped.

It is too long, too still, and too quiet. Yet even the small changes, when indistinct but blandly kind faces invade the stillness to rearrange her pillows, or bring her food, or flip pages of their clipboards, threaten to overwhelm her entirely.

They speak to her, sometimes, but their indistinct words rarely penetrate the wall that seems to surround her mind. When they press her for answers, she vaguely murmurs assents to questions she has not heard, and they retreat again, appeased.

It takes a long time for her to bring herself back under control, to push away the jumble of _thoughts she cannot think_ from creeping back in through the wall with the others.

So she stares at the window.

She does not want to go outside, she does not even want to see through the window—and she did yell at one of the women for that, when she tried to pull the curtains open for her. She does not want to see the evidence of a world still moving outside of this room.

Because she has lost her entire family.

All of them, in the blink of an eye. She has seen them blown to pieces in front of her. She has seen them crushed by falling debris from the historical estate as it crumbled from its foundations. She has seen them vaporized, transformed into dark shadows imprinted on brick and cobblestone as they stood. She has seen those unlucky enough not to have been instantly killed, bleeding out on the pavement near the fountain, mere yards from where she had been, screaming their unimaginable pain and calling out in quickly fading voices until they too were gone.

It was supposed to have been a happy day.

It had been a happy day, the most joyous of her cousins' lives. They were young and beautiful and about to start a new life together.

Mom had been happy too, glued to her father's side with one armed wrapped around his as she sipped her delicate glass of wine and he laughed with family members he hadn't been able to see in years.

She had been elated to slip away for a moment, just so that she could call Saji and share with him how perfect it all was, and how she wished he had been there too, but then the call had dropped and his face had vanished from her screen and then—

And then the courtyard had disappeared forever.

She has seen too much death.

Too much death and destruction, too many broken limbs, splayed out in impossible angles as white bone jutted out from inside sharp three piece suits and torn lace.

The stink of death is in her nose, and she cannot smell the sterile odor of her room. Every time she closes her eyes, she sees the imprints of the dead, draped over the fountain, bloodied fingers outstretched toward her. And when she tries to sleep—

She breathes shakily, and the pounding of her heartbeat finally replaces the screaming that rings in her ears. The deadly deadly quiet that followed does not leave her, even now.

She has lost her family. Every single person in her entirely family. There is no one left now, no cousins or great aunts or grandparents. Each of them had put their family first, pushing aside all their other affairs or obligations so that they could attend the wedding. They had all been standing there in that courtyard when the Gundams attacked.

And now she—she is—

How can she be the only one left?

She is seventeen years old.

Only seventeen years old and she is the only Halevy left in the world.

She has lost her entire family, and part of her body, and she is left with nothing but the white glow from the window.

As she stares at it, her eyes begin to burn again with tears she thought she had long since cried out, and she finds that she does not have the energy to stop them.

* * *

He gets the message as he sits waiting on an empty bench in the train station.

He is out of place, here, in this foreign country, but he has been sent home by the only person he knows in this hemisphere. It's still nearly an hour before his train comes in, but he has no interest in sightseeing or even picking up a quick meal before he begins the long journey back home to an apartment that will seen too quiet and a campus that will feel too big without Louise there beside him with her bright eyes and joyous laugh.

What he wouldn't give to see her eyes shining with something other than tears, or to hear that laugh again. But he worries that it may be gone for a long long time.

She will need time to grieve and come to terms with her injury and the new reality of her life. He knows that it will take time, knows, even, that she will never truly be over what she has experienced, but he is sure that she can heal, given time and care and a shoulder to lean on and a hand to clasp in her own.

He had hoped, he had planned, to be the one there at her side, there to help however she needed, whether she wanted it or not. Just as Kinue had been for him after their dad-

He knows what it is like to be an orphan. He knows what it is like to lose everything that makes your life happy and simple and comfortable.

And he's had several closes shaves with death of his own, thanks to Celestial Being.

He had hoped that he and Louise had been through enough with each other, meant enough to each other, that she would let him do this for her, at least.

But she refused. She didn't want him there by her side, didn't want him anymore. Not now, not for a while.

And he understands. He hates it, but he understands.

He just hopes that she knows he isn't shallow enough to desert her, isn't selfish enough to leave her, not so terrible to give her up just because she is injured, or more high maintenance than normal, or required more patience and reassurance that everything would somehow turn out okay.

He will never stop loving her and he will never truly leave her. He repeats this to himself on the empty platform, as if he can make himself believe it even as he is about to board a train back to Japan. He will never leave her and he is not abandoning her now.

He had waited outside, agonizing over whether he should throw it all away and walk right back inside the hospital and refuse to leave her, no matter what dramatic stunts she may try to pull. It had taken everything in him to turn around and walk out that door.

But it was what she wanted, and she was strong. Louise would make it to space one day, he is sure of that. Otherwise, he would never have gone, never would have risked losing her. But she had asked him to promise and he had done so.

And so now he waits on the bench, waiting because there is nothing else to do. He has arrived too early and this wing of the station is still practically deserted.

It is awful sitting here and waiting. When he checks the time, he finds that it has only been two hours since he left her side, but he misses Louise so much, and feels like there is a gaping hole inside him now that he has left the hospital. He doesn't know if he will be able to do this for days and months and years until he sees her again.

He misses her so much already, and is desperate for some kind of link to her again. He pulls out his terminal and pulls up her number, fingers ghosting over the numbers as he debates whether to place the call.

It's only been a few hours, but he did promise to keep in touch. He finally decides that he can allow himself a short call once he boards the train, just to let her know that he's gotten off safely.

Until then, he pulls up their old conversation threads, clicking back through her messages— they are silly and over the top and full of emojis and characters and cats and flowers and he had always smiled when she sent him messages that were more picture than text.

But it hurts him now, knowing that these messages are form another time, another life. Some of them are barely ten days old, and yet they belong to a different Louise than the one in the hospital room. They are bubbly and bright and full of all the things she seems to have lost since her parents died.

He clutches the terminal tighter in his hands as he scrolls down to another and another and then the device beeps in his hand, alerting him to an incoming message.

It's from Louise's phone. Not that he thinks she's the one typing, but he had made sure that the nurses would accommodate her communication—and had made sure to leave his own contact information with the nurse who had taken over as Louise's primary caretaker during the day.

He'd also asked her to let him know the moment there was any change he should know about. Because just because Louise didn't want to see him doesn't mean that he can't keep in touch with her and make sure she's doing okay.

He pulls open the message and—

He stares at the terminal in his hand, blinking rapidly in an attempt to push back the tears that fall anyway, fall hot and fast down his face before his brain has even fully processed the words he's reading.

* * *

She is left with nothing but the suffocating weight of Saji's love.

He has always been too good for her—she's known this for years, but the full weight of it doesn't hit her until he appears in her hospital room when he should have been in class halfway around the world.

It takes her a long minute to realize what she's seeing, and that he's truly in the room with her and not in their history class in Japan. She stares at him, doubled over and panting hard like he has run the entire way over continents to find her, and does not know what to say except— _Saji_.

He lifts his head as she breathes his name, and his smile is soft and sweet and utterly blinding.

She can do nothing but blink as he stands up and walks forward, crossing the space to her bed in quick, strong strides. And then he's there, he's within arm's reach, and the air moves around her as he gets closer.

She thinks that he is the only real thing to enter this room since she woke up in the hospital.

He's talking— babbling, as he has always done during the rare hours that she didn't lead the conversation— cheerfully as he pulls up a chair. And she can't bring herself to care that she hasn't caught a word of it because—because Saji is _here_.

He is here and he has come for her and she finds herself staring at him like he might disappear at any second. But with every passing moment, the certainty that he is really and truly here and isn't going away solidifies and sharpens in the fog that fills her mind.

Then, he's reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small box that she does not recognize. When he opens the lid and holds it out to her, she can see the two gold rings inside, and in a sudden jolt, she understands where it came from, what these are.

She cannot fathom how he was able to afford these until he explains that he's been taking extra shifts ever since she saw them in the window of the high end jewelry designer and dramatically demanded that he buy them for her. She had only been half serious about them, even then, but all this time, Saji had been saving his hard-earned money so that he could get her what she wanted.

He's holding the rings out to her, offering them up for her to take but all she can do is sit, transfixed by the scene before her as something awful crawls out of the pit of her stomach and lodges in the back of her throat.

Saji, poor sweet Saji, poor spineless Saji, has finally gotten the guts to stand up and pour out his heart to her, finally admitting all that she means to him and all that he hopes he means to her, and he blurts out his feelings, so earnest and heartfelt, and it's all she can do not to break down and sob.

It's all she's ever wanted, but not like this.

She's hoped that he would confess his feelings to her for months now, had even entertained the hope that it's how he would wish her safe travels when he saw her off at the airport less than two weeks ago.

But it feels like years have passed since he blushed red and stammered that he couldn't kiss her in public, and so much has changed since then. Her world has been shattered beyond repair, and the gulf that stands between them now is too far for even Saji to cross.

She can't—she _can't_ —

She tries to shut him down, grasping for the words that will make him see sense, but he waves away her concerns with a shake of his head and a smile.

Tears are brimming in her eyes by the time she pulls her stump of an arm out from beneath the covers where, as long as it's out of sight and she can still feel the phantom pains in her fingertips, she can pretend that it's not entirely gone.

She hears him gasp, with shock and revulsion as he stares at the white bandages wrapping what should have been her wrist, and he knocks over his chair as he stands abruptly, the horror dawning as he understands now that her hand is gone and that she is un able to wear the rings he had worked so hard to purchase.

The tears are heavy and hot and come more quickly than they have in days, but she cannot stop them, even though she can feel Saji's horrified stare burning into her. She cannot accept him like this. She cannot even bear to be in the same room with him when he is looking at her like this and she cannot stop crying.

She can't be with him now and can't that idiot see it? See what his near proposal means?

A nurse comes in, then, and mercifully takes Saji by the elbow, steering him out of the room even though it's clear, despite his wide eyes and trembling hands, that he doesn't actually want to go. The nurse is forceful in her insistence that he leave Louise alone, however, and for this she is grateful.

She knows that as soon as Saji is ushered out into the hallway, he will hear the nature of her injury, and the reality that it cannot be repaired. The nurse will explain, just as she did to Louise, that although the doctors had tried everything they could think of, there is nothing to be done for her. Regeneration treatments have failed.

Though money is no object, and many of the best minds the medical community has to offer have rallied around this problem, there is no cure.

Something is wrong with her, wrong inside her. It's a disease of the Gundams, who have already destroyed so much, and it will destroy her from inside once it finishes spreading throughout her body. It has already taken her hand and it will take the rest of her as well, given enough time.

She is lost and alone and broken and she will never be whole again.

The knowledge will knock some sense back into Saji, and he will return to his classes, to his practical sister, to the home and calm life he loves so much, leaving behind her neediness and dramatics and temper tantrums dragging him out on the town.

Saji will leave and no one else will come for her.

He is crying in the hallway—she can hear it perfectly through the still-open doorway, now that the nurse has finished her hushed explanation of the damage caused by the red particles.

She clutches the sheets on her bed in her one remaining hand, and wipes furiously as her eyes.

He will leave and she will be free to break down in peace. She will not have to save face for anyone; once he leaves, she will finally be rid of everyone in her life. He will leave and go away and turn his back on her and forget about everything and she can simply wither away in the hospital without bothering him again.

She is sure, as she listens to his wretched sobs, that as soon as he walks out of the hospital doors, he will be gone, and she is glad for it.

* * *

Saji numbly clicks out of the message and tries scrolling back through the older ones, but finds that he can't see any of them through his blurry vision.

He can't believe that he's sitting here, looking at these messages when—when they are the only things he has left of Louise now.

When he takes a deep breath only for it to turn into a sob, he realizes that there is no stopping it, no holding back the tears, and so he bows his head and cries, right there in the middle of the station, in public for everyone to see if they wanted to.

He doesn't care, he can't care.

He sits, curled in on himself, clutching the terminal in his hands and crying with all that is inside him.

Other passengers begin milling around this wing of the station, but they are careful to stay clear of him. No one tries to sit on the other side of the bench. No one asks him if he is okay. He is not okay and he is not sure that he will ever be okay again.

His train comes and leaves without him and still he cries until his tears are dried up and refuse to come any longer.

He remains sitting only because his strength is spent and he does not think he can push himself up. His hands are shaking, his limbs unwieldy, and everything around him seems to be a blur.

But he cannot stay in the station forever.

He has to—

He doesn't want to have to look at the message again, but he needs to respond, and so he pulls it up in front of him once more. He also needs to tell Kinue that he will not be home as soon as he'd anticipated. He doesn't know what else to tell her, though, doesn't know how he can possibly put this into words. And there's nothing she can do, so after hovering over the keys for several minutes, he simply manages to tell her that he'll be home later.

And then he clumsily turns off his terminal and stores it in his bag before wiping his eyes and heading for the same doors he'd entered through just an hour or two before.

He hails the first taxi in line and, when the man learns he's going to the hospital, taking in the bags and puffy eyes, gives a small _oh_ and thankfully avoids all attempts at small talk until they arrive.

The man pulls up to the curb just in front of the hospital and Saji swipes a card, blindly paying whatever the man wants to charge him for the ride. Slinging the large back over his shoulder, he steps out onto the pavement and stands there for a long minute after the man has driven away.

The hospital is busy and he has to step out of the way more than once as visitors walk in or discharged patients are wheeled out.

He doesn't want to go in, doesn't want to—

But he must and so he does, unsteadily tracing his steps back to the hallway with which he has become so familiar over the past week.

One of the nurses recognizes him before he gets very far, and pulls him aside to the small room he'd waited in, speaking in a low voice, asking him if he knew her to have any suicidal tendencies, asking him if he knew where she got the knife—

He shakes his head numbly, because Louise didn't so much as move from her bed whenever he was in her room, and he certainly didn't—wouldn't _ever have_ —

The nurse seems satisfied with this and finally asks if he'd like to see her.

When Saji nods jerkily, she starts to lead him through hallway after hallway until they're in a part of the hospital that he has never seen. The walls here are a combination of flat white and stainless steel, and he starts to recognize it as the same kind of room he'd seen his dad it, years ago, just after he had died. They'd offered to let him sit and wait outside, if he didn't want to see, but Kinue was the only one left to identify the body and he had been too scared to let go of her hand so he'd followed her into the room laid out with gurneys and shining metal tables and human sized bags.

But Kinue isn't here to hold his hand, this time, and he realizes with a pang that there also isn't anyone else who would be able to officially identify Louise, if they were bringing him down here for something other than paying his respects and saying his final goodbyes.

The nurse stands back in the doorway and Saji realizes that there is no need for her to come further into the room—there is only one body laid out, and it is instantly recognizable as Louise.

He stands there too long before staggering forward to her side. She is unnaturally white, even the cuts on her maimed armed have been washed out and she's been changed out of what must have been bloody clothes.

He slips his hands into hers almost without thinking about it, and as her curls his fingers over hers, the sobs tear out of him and there's nothing he can do to stop them. He leans over her, the larger of the two rings slipping out of his collar to glint gold as it hangs just above her face and he closes his eyes tight against the pain that he thinks will tear him apart from the inside out.

"Why?" he chokes out, "Why did you do it? Why did you have to do it, Louise?" he demands, voice wavering as he cries out his question to a room from which he can receive no answer.

If only he had—if only he had never left, or if he had immediately turned around again when he'd had the chance—but now it is too late _it is too late_ and it can never be okay again because she is gone and Louise is dead and she's _dead_ —

He doesn't know how long the nurse waits for him in the doorway, but he feels limp and exhausted when he has finally cried himself hoarse and knows that he must get up. He cannot stay here forever, and so he gently extricates his fingers from between hers and places a kiss on her forehead before forcing himself to turn away.

He doesn't know how to arrange a funeral, has no clue where to even begin. But he thinks that the nurses must know, or at least, must know a place to direct him.

At least he knows the cemetery where the rest of her family is buried.

She'd been to the funeral ceremony, of course, the only one there, really, huddled in a wheelchair in the chilly rain-soaked morning, but the doctors hadn't wanted her to leave the hospital again until she'd made a fully recovery. She hadn't shown any inclination to leave anyway, so he had taken flowers there on her behalf after he'd arrived.

He'd stared with wide eyes at the long row of carved granite, pile after pile of freshly upturned earth mounded over the green grass.

Now there would be one more.

* * *

But no, the idiot walks right back through the door the next day to come see her.

Louise can't believe her eyes as he knocks on the door—confidently, not the timid rap he used to give at her apartment—and comes in without waiting for her answer. He won't be dissuaded, apparently, as he drags the chair near the foot of her bed, making it nearly impossible for her to completely turn away from him.

She can't believe what she's seeing, because while she expects him to skittishly avoid looking at her after everything he has learned, he looks her directly in the eye, tilting his head a little bit as he smiles. Smiles so sweetly, and so sadly, that it makes her heart want to break.

But she has no heart left. Her heart is broken, shattered into a thousand shards that can never be repaired. Her heart is dead, killed in the attack that took the lives of her entire family.

Doesn't he understand?

He doesn't know what to say—there is nothing to say, there is nothing that words can do, that words can fix, because her family is dead and gone forever, and she alone is left—but Saji has always been comfortable with the silence. He never did feel the need to initiate conversation when they were together, because he was simply content to sit in her presence, sharing in the comfort of another body beside him. He was always more than happy to listen to her talk about anything on her mind.

She told him all sorts of things, once.

She would tell him about her plans for the day, and her plans for the future. The new style of shoes she wanted to get to match with her sundress, and why she had chosen to take her study abroad program in Japan. The color of eye shadow that best brought out the deep green of her eyes, and why she had woken him up that day in the school commons. What kind of food she thought most likely to impress her mom when she finally made good on her threat to visit her at school, and what life was like for her back home…

She has nothing to tell him now, nothing to say.

Words dry up long before they have a chance to get to her throat. She is empty. She is hollow. She is broken.

Her eyes barely meet his for a fraction of a second before they skirt away. She looks down but there is nothing there but a lack under the bulk of the blanket that reminds her of all that she has lost.

Instead, she stares at the window, at the curtain that does not flutter, and the blue of the sky beyond. She is unable to do more to deter conversation than turning away, as confined to the bed as she is, and so she hopes that this will be enough to make him understand that she doesn't want to talk to him, and doesn't want him to talk to her.

He twists his hands in his lap and glances up at her sometimes—she can see this out of the corner of her eye without turning around. His smile has long since faded, and he still doesn't know what to say, but he also does not make any moves to leave.

She blinks rapidly to keep the tears at bay and Saji stays seated beside her bed until the nurses tell him that visiting hours are over and he will have to leave.

At the door, he turns and stares sorrowfully back at her, haltingly promising to come again the next day.

Her throat is still tight with emotion that she has refused to let surface, and so she does not think that she could make any reply to this even if she wanted to. She closes her eyes as the nurse leads Saji away and can only hope with everything that is left in her that he won't come back, that he will just leave her alone.

He doesn't, though, and somehow, she isn't surprised. She has been bracing herself to survive visiting hours without breaking since the moment the doctors woke her up with more questions and clipboards.

Saji comes the next day, and the next, waiting out in the hallway sometimes for over an hour until the visiting hours officially begin and the nurses finally allow him to pass through their protective barricade. She knows this because the nurses tell her. Tell her every day that the nice young man is waiting, that her boyfriend is just outside, that Saji is waiting for her.

They'd let him in earlier if she gave her permission, but it is too much being alone with Saji and she cannot survive any more time with him staring at her with that soft sympathetic smile of his—she thinks that some of the nurses are waiting for any sign that can be construed as such, and something twists inside her to think that Saji has so effortlessly won them over.

He does that so easily. It's impossible for anyone who meets Saji not to like him. She had known that her mother would fall for him in days, so long as he wasn't bullied into going home.

It had been hard to keep him around, back then, but now she cannot seem to make him go away.

Every day, he brings her more flowers to brighten up the room, although they do nothing to dispel the smell of death from her nose and throat, turning them sickly sweet instead. He's also purchased a dozen or so get-well cards, and filled them out himself so that the table beside her bed looks as it should be—filled with well wishes and condolences from too many people to count.

No other mail is delivered to her room, however, and the room remains empty except for the things he brings with him each day. She does not mind that there is no one else left to send her sympathy, but her throat closes up every time he seems to see it as a challenge to make up for the lack.

He stands the cards up side by side beside her and, when she makes no move to look at them or the sentiments written inside, he smiles and says that's alright, that there will be plenty of time for her to look at them when he is gone.

She opened the closest one to her, one night, and worked herself into near hysterics before a nurse came in with some medicine to help her calm down and get some sleep. After waking up the next morning, her puffy eyes still stinging and the tear tracks stiff on her cheeks until she rubs them away, she decides that she will not touch any of the others.

And so Saji's cards remain in place exactly as he leaves them, alongside the container of two-bite brownies he insists Kinue told him to give to her.

Louise tries to muster a smile for him when he tells her that, but the corners of her mouth tremble at best.

Kinue has never approved of them dating, has never thought that she was a good match for Saji. And she had been right. It was almost funny how this was the only thing Saji seemed to disagree with his sister about.

She wonders when he will finally listen to her.

* * *

Saji returns to Japan a few days after the tiny funeral ceremony, too numb in his dazed guilty grief to wonder why the apartment is empty of Kinue's understanding touch until he realizes that there is spoiled milk in the fridge and that his sister isn't answering her phone.

Several of his missed calls are from the Chief of Police and so Saji finds himself identifying her body in a room that looks identical to the one which had held Louise and running through funeral preparations for the second time in a week.

He does not see Setsuna to invite him to the funeral. Although, now that he thinks about it, he's not sure that he and Kinue ever even met. She hadn't known too many of his friends from school, either, because on the rare occasions he hosted social gatherings, she had been working late nights on the beat.

It is just a few people from JNN who stand beside him as her casket is lowered into the ground, and they speak meaningless platitudes and offer comfortless assistance to him should he need it.

He is running on auto-pilot, and stares at the hole that begins to fill with dirt, and does not hear a word they say.

Saji goes back to school the week after that, applying himself to his studies with a vengeance. He does not miss another day of class and is able to make up all of his lost term work without telling most of his professors about his extenuating circumstances, although they all treat his terse "funeral" as an answer for his prolonged absence with too much understanding.

He sits ramrod straight in his chair during lectures, hanging on his professors' every word, paying more attention to the class discussions now than he ever has before.

He no longer stays late after class to catch up with friends, and does not take them up on offers to meet for coffee or dinner. Only a few people ask after Louise, and the stark truth comes out of him strangled and ashen. They cry at the news, and offer vague comforts that he has no plans to take them up on— his tears have long since dried up and he does not seem to feel a thing.

He picks up extra shifts at the pizza place, delivering hot boxes to different apartments ever night, making enough money to sustain himself even though his co-workers and supervisors tell him that he doesn't need to come in if he doesn't want to, that they'll understand—but he shakes his head and picks up the next outgoing batch.

He shows up for work every day and, although they're concerned, they're not about to turn him away, especially not now that this is his only source of income, so they shake their heads and try to tell him to take it easy, but let him take as many shifts as he wants.

His eyes are red-rimmed and puffy and bloodshot more often than not, but no one stops to question him or pull him aside to ask if he is alright. He is glad for this, because he's fairly sure he would be able to convince anyone that he's coping with this in a healthy way, but he doesn't think that he can keep going any other way and he has to keep going because he promised.

He promised—

At night, he goes home to his empty apartment and turns on the news before he opens his box of pizza and pulls out his homework. JNN is a constant rumble in the background, showing Celestial Being's every move.

He follows their every intervention, watches every battle, and pours over each wave of casualties.

He stares at the screen in silence with his bloodshot eyes and watches the Gundams' every move, hoping that this is the day they will get taken down, that this is the day they don't make it out alive. Their encounters continue, though, as each bloc's forces fail to put a stop to their continuing violence.

He wants them dead, wants them blasted out of the sky, crushed inside their twisted metal mobile suits, and eliminated from the world that they have so thoroughly destroyed, but they keep going, long after they have any right to. Their reign of terror continues around the planet, showing them beyond a shadow of a doubt for the monsters they are.

With every intervention, more people die, and more people end up in the hospital— foot soldiers in bases they target, pilots torn from the wreckage of their suits, or civilians like Louise, who had no reason to be involved in the first place, never deserved anything that happened to them.

It goes on and on and on until the world governments finally decide that enough is enough and gather their aces together, uniting against a common enemy. They have new suits. No one knows how they got them, but it doesn't matter, because with these new machines, the world powers believe they can take on the Gundams, and they launch a full assault on Celestial Being.

 _Fallen Angels_ , they call it, and Saji thinks it appropriate indeed.

He can't imagine now how he had ever thought they might have been benign, might even have been a beneficial force in the world, for saving the gravity block. He had watched their emergence on the world stage with interest, he recalls, and feels sickened that he didn't see them for what they were straight from the start.

He wants them to die. He wants them to suffer. He wants them to burn, and he watches every moment of the campaign with bated breath until it's over.

It's over and the Gundams have been defeated—they are captured or destroyed and their pilots killed in the never-ending dark void, far away from the planet they can never harm again.

He does not thing he has ever been so relieved in his life, to know that are gone, and he tells Louise how happy he is that the entire world united to bring that scum to justice and punish them for what they had done to her family, what they had done to her.

It's like his life has started anew, once the Gundams are gone. He can walk freely, once more, knowing that they have been destroyed in every way possible and can never hurt anyone again. There is no more bloodshed and the world has united to maintain a peace it has not known in centuries.

His studies are going well—he's even risen to the top of his class, and his professors regularly tell him when they hear of a new internship that might get him into space. He begins researching various companies and the new systems they are developing, trying to figure out what path will get him to space like he had promised.

He still writes to Louise every week, like he had told her he would, keeping her updated on his progress, reviewing the pros and cons of each program he applies to, and telling her about every new step he hurdles to bring them closer to their shared dream.

She never writes back.

* * *

When Saji comes, he talks to her softly, of all kinds of things. He tells her more of his childhood in this one week than she has ever known in the years they've known each other.

He also talks about things of no consequence—about the man whose brother had ordered a pizza without warning him first, so that he answered the door in nothing but boxers and mismatched socks, but had apologetically tipped him a twenty after he dug his wallet out from the mess on the floor, about the new stir-fry recipe that he'd stumbled across recently and wants to try out on Kinue after they both go back to Japan, and the next book he's supposed to read for his world literature class.

His voice is kind and soft in understanding, realizing that she isn't focusing on much of what he's saying, but content to continue talking simply for her to know that he is there.

He is nothing but loving, even after all this, and even though she cannot feel anything else, she is certain that she cannot bear this any longer. She cannot stand the thought of Saji staying here with her one more minute, let alone through the rest of the semester, the rest of her stay in the hospital, the rest of her life.

Doesn't he see how superficial she has always been? How, now that all of that has been stripped away, there is nothing left to her? That he is trying to anchor himself to a receding tide and that he'll wash away to nothing too if he tries to stay by her side?

She is orphaned, disfigured, and should not be alive after her entire world has been engulfed in flames, torn apart and blown to pieces for no reason whatsoever. The Gundams have stolen everything—there is nothing left for her here and there is certainly nothing left for him in her.

Louise is certain that he will stay with her forever if she lets him, and knows that he is stupidly loyal enough to do it, too. He would saddle himself to her without a second thought, slaving away to provide her with the best care he could secure, but in doing so, he would give up his own life and dreams to make sure she was never alone again.

She cannot let him.

She may be lost but she will not let him go down with her.

Every time he walks into her room, her resolve grows to cut herself off from him, separate them, call the whole thing off. She will never be what he wants, anymore, and they can never be what she hoped they would one day become.

But he will never desert her—she knows this, and so she has to be the one to put her foot down. She has to put an end to this once and for all.

The problem is that he is so persistent. So upright, so gallant, so self-sacrificial without a second thought, and he refuses to hear anything of it.

He will not leave her side, and refuses to move until her firm insistence, coupled with the presence of medical staff enforcing visiting hours, that keeps him from sitting by her side the entire day and into the night.

A week passes before she realizes that there is only one thing she can to do convince Saji to go back home, go back to school so that he can at least finish his semester. Earn his degree so he doesn't have to work at the pizza place anymore.

They both know he has spent most of his meager savings on the set of matching gold rings—he has taken to wearing his around his neck, dangling over his jacket when he gets up and sits down, though she has not so much as looked at hers in the case he slipped into her hand—and he still has an international flight home.

He can't stay here indefinitely, can't abandon his studies. He can't live without getting a proper job. And his degree, he can work his way up to a job that will take him to space, where he can finally do whatever he wants.

When he tells her that all he wants is to be by her side, she hunches in on herself and does not think she has ever felt so unspeakable worthless in her entire life. She is not worth him staying, and that knowledge makes it possible for her to do what needs to be done.

She has to all but plead with him to make him go, and she delves deep inside herself to find the emotions with which to do so. It all comes up to the surface again, threatening to overwhelm her with the intensity of it all. She tries to push back against the glimpses of emotions she thought gone forever, for they are sharp and far too strong, and she does not need to summon any tears, she simply has to stop trying to hold them in.

She asks him one last time to leave. She asks him go away and fulfill his dreams so that she can fulfill hers.

Just do it, she says, please, please just _go_.

She's sure that if he stays, that decision will become the thing he regrets most in his life and tells him so, says that he doesn't want him to come to resent her, hate her for clinging onto him and holding him here, keeping him trapped on the surface of the planet when all he has ever wanted to do is work among the stars.

That is what he has been working toward his entire life, and that is what Kinue has sacrificed so much to get for him. He can't give that up just to sit in a hospital room next to someone who cannot be helped.

She tells him to go, leave her behind, and she asks him to do it for her. She asks him to let her fulfill her dreams too.

Her voice doesn't break and she is proud of it, proud of the way she manages to look him in the eye as he stares back at her, devastation and near betrayal painted clearly across his face until something strengthens inside him. She watches his shoulders pull back and his hands clench into determined fists in his lap.

"Okay, Louise. Okay," he says, and she is so relieved that she could cry, but she cannot break here, not yet, or he'd never leave again.

"I'll do it for you and I'll write to you every week and then I'll make it up into space. Don't you worry, that's a promise."

She smiles waveringly at him. "Wait for me there, okay, Saji?"

His face twists but he nods when his voice fails him. "Okay," he says, "okay, I'll wait for you. I'll wait for you in space."

He seems to understand that this is the end, and he slowly stands to make his goodbyes.

She turns away so that he cannot kiss her, even on the cheek, though he would, now, given the chance.

He walks slowly, almost painfully toward the door, and turns back when he gets there. He hovers for a long minute, drinking in his last look at her, and she will not look and she does not look and he's still waiting there and she finally forces herself to turn toward him to see his face one last time as well.

The smile on her face is brilliant as she says, "Thank you, Saji," with more feeling and sincerity in her voice than he has, perhaps, ever heard.

He makes an odd noise, then, and disappears through the doorway.

She cannot see out the window, can still see nothing but the blinding, glaring white light streaming in, but she is sure that Saji is standing outside on the sidewalk, staring back at the building. It would not surprise her if he had found her window, even.

But he is gone. He is gone because she asked him to go, and he won't be coming back.

The room is silent now. Empty.

The flowers stand on the table next to her, next to all of the cards, and she lets out a shaky breath as she finally allows herself to fall apart.


End file.
